The Ruins of Mars (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy Book 1) (16 page)

     
Standing, she had protested, “But you already have my picture on file.”

     
Raising the Tablet and pointing it at her, the agent had barked, “We need a current picture for your new clearance profile. There I’m done.”

     
Turning on his heel, the man had marched out of the room. Only this time, she remembered, he did not close the doors behind him. As Liu dropped back into the plastic swivel chair she had been occupying for the better part of two hours, a brown-skinned young man in shorts and a t-shirt had walked past the open door. Noticing her sitting alone in the long conference room, he had stopped and leaned on the door frame, smiling in at her.

      “
Hi,” he’d greeted warmly. “You’re the payload expert aren't you? Xao-Xing Liu right?”

     
She remembered feeling her cheeks warm under his friendly gaze as she replied, “How did you know?”

     
Acting a little embarrassed, but still with a grin on his face, he had answered, “Um, you’re Chinese, and the new excavators have Mandarin written all over them.”

     
Touching her chin with two fingers, she had laughed softly, then asked, “Who are you? Are you part of the crew?”

      “
Yep. My name is Harrison Raheem Assad. I’m the archaeologist they’ve chosen to go.”

     
Holding her hand out for him to take, Liu had sighed, “So you’re the one who’s commandeering two of my diggers.”

     
Laughing loudly at this, he had taken her delicate hand in his own. His touch, she remembered, was firm and gentle, yet his fingers and palms were a little rough as if he often played in the dirt.

     
I suppose he does, she had thought to herself wryly.

     
Their embrace only lasted for a second, but still she remembered how it had made her feel. That light handshake had been the one and only time she had allowed herself to touch the young archaeologist.

     
After that, he had stayed with her, sitting down in a chair next to hers while the G men finished intensely scrutinizing her credentials and identification. When at last she had been allowed to enter the facility, Harrison had held the door and walked with her to her room. His easy nature and honest smile had extinguished her doubts about joining the crew. After all, going to Mars was about more than just governments. It was about building a new community with people. The crew of Braun was as much an experiment in anthropology as it was a scientific mission to establish a human colony. They were going to Mars to build the foundations for a new world, a world of tolerance and cooperation. This man—this American—had instantly treated her—a Chinese national—like an old friend. Now, over a year and a half later, her kinship with him had only grown stronger. The experiment was working already.

     
Biting her lip in the cool darkness of her husband’s Beijing apartment, Liu wished to herself that there was a way they could be more than just friends. She wanted him as a lover. A companion.

     
But this is the life you’ve chosen, she told herself. This is the life you have to live.

     
Across the room, Donovan watched with cold indifference as Xao-Xing Liu lay in bed pretending to sleep. Aware now that she was indeed pretending, Donovan recorded her unmoving figure with relentless patience. For a moment, Tianwang felt as though there might be another presence in the apartment. Scanning the darkened rooms, he looked directly at the oily shadow that was Donovan with unseeing eyes. Satisfied that the home was empty and secure, Tianwang reported as much to his handlers in the Chinese Intelligence Commission. Unworried, Donovan continued to watch the bed, the faint thrill of voyeurism prickling deep down inside his consciousness. It was one of the few feelings he was aware he had.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The first night aboard Braun—December
2047
(eleven hours to final departure)

     
Harrison rubbed his thighs vigorously to warm them as he sat in his cylindrical bedroom aboard Braun. The small space reminded him of a storm drain pipe because of its curved metal walls and ceiling, yet the twinkling of Tablet screens and track lighting gave the room an undeniably more advanced appearance. A twin bed was recessed into a wall cubby at the end of the room: its memory foam mattress looking soft and inviting compared to the sterile spartan surroundings. Harrison was not accustomed to sleeping on his back, but in order for the magnets in his suit to keep him held to those in the bed, he would have to get used to it. Sitting at his narrow workstation along one wall, he viewed the images from Mars like a man going through the tired motions of a mundane job. Flicking from one picture to the next, he studied the peculiar layout of the Martian ruins.

     
Protected on three sides by massive walls, the entire site sat with its back directly on the southwestern rim of the Valles Marineris. Nearly thirty square kilometers, the Martian ruin grid was almost double the size of Machu Picchu, and the largest dome buried into the bedrock covered fourteen acres, making it bigger than the base of the Great Pyramid at Giza. The other smaller domes near the western wall were arranged in groups of three and interconnected by what looked like narrow roads or lanes. Following the cluster of small domes near the wall were other buildings, though they appeared so badly damaged that their size and shape were difficult to determine. Next, a large crescent-moon-shaped piazza, or square, covered roughly seven acres and divided the various buildings of the ruin grid from the monolithic chamber near the canyon's rim.

     
To Harrison, this was all old news—for he had been studying the same pictures going on three years. Remus and Romulus had died as far as he could tell and thus had not been able to make more passes of the site. NASA refused to send another set of satellites out to the planet for fear that the expense involved in developing the required AI might be the proverbial straw to break the camel's back. Already, public sentiment towards Project Braun was in slight decline—as years had passed since the discovery of the ruins with little new information on the topic. Much of the pressure brought to the project was at the hands of the relentless news media. Like squawking crows, the networks made it a personal vendetta to document and report on every penny spent on the mission to Mars.

     
Today, however, the tone had been decidedly more positive. That morning, the crew bound for Mars had boarded Braun for the first time ever, in preparation for departure. It had been an emotionally draining day filled with press conferences, lengthy speeches and internationally broadcast video chat sessions with families back on Earth. The countdown clock to final departure had officially clicked over to twenty-five hours, and three years of waiting were drawing to a foreseeable close. Among that morning’s ceremonies had been the transfer of the AI Braun from the servers of Bessel Base to the systems of the ship. Dr. YiJay Lee had slid the long, flat, rectangular memory card containing Braun’s personality into the central server network, and at that moment, the air aboard the ship had noticeably charged with the tingle of an unseen entity. Camera crews had filmed pointlessly, as if hoping to catch an image of the mighty AI as he spoke his first words aboard the ship.

      “
To infinity and beyond.”

     
The reporters had exchanged quizzical looks as YiJay burst into a fit of nervous laughter.

      “
It’s from an old movie I showed him some time ago,” she explained to the confused crowd. “It’s a story about inanimate objects—toys—with personalities. I felt it would help him to realize that he is a living soul despite being inorganic.”

     
At that, polite laughter had broken out among the newsmen, then Braun had offered to take any questions they might have. For nearly two hours, reporters had shouted to be heard as the sentient AI calmly replied with mechanical honesty to every question put before him.

     
Now, ten hours later, the ship was silent and calm. All of the reporters had departed, and the only people on board were the crew of Braun. Alone in his room, Harrison yawned deeply and stretched. Shivering unconsciously in the chilly air of the massive ship, he tapped the Tablet inlaid in his workstation, and the images of the ruins winked out.

      “
Would you like me to adjust the temperature in your quarters?” spoke the disembodied voice of Braun.

     
Jumping a little, Harrison stammered, “Um, yes please. Thanks.”

      “
It’s no trouble, Harrison.”

     
For some reason it bothered Harrison to hear Braun use his name so genially. His feelings towards the massive AI were somehow different than those he felt for Alexandria. Though similarly friendly, as all AIs were, Braun held his life in his hands. The very thought was unsettling to say the least.

      “
Braun,” he said carefully.

      “
Yes, Harrison?”

      “
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want you coming in here unless I call you. Is that alright?”

     
There was a brief pause, during which time Harrison felt the temperature of his room rise several degrees. Then Braun spoke again.

      “
I will do my best to respect your privacy, Harrison.”

     
That’s not really what I asked, now is it, Harrison thought with a frown.

      “
Thanks,” he finally said aloud. “And thanks for turning up the heat.”

     
Pushing up from his chair, he felt the tension of the magnets in the back and buttocks of his suit break free. With the dizzying and almost uncomfortable feeling of zero gravity, he floated up a little ways, then pushed himself off the ceiling with a finger. Turning awkwardly in the air, he tried to remember his training.

      “
When moving in zero G,” James Floyd had told them. “Every movement you make must be followed with a counter movement. There is no resistance from gravity, so your motions will at first seem over-exaggerated. Think ten times before moving a finger and twenty before moving an arm. That’s what Leonov said, and he was damn right!”

     
Spinning in the air, Harrison pulled his knees up to his chest and bunched himself into something like a human ball. Bouncing gently off the walls and ceiling, he laughed to himself with childish delight. A soft tapping sound from the hatch interrupted his experimental playtime and he straightened out, reaching for the ceiling rail.

      “
Just a second,” he called as he gripped the rail that ran the length of his room.

     
Making his way to the hatch, he touched the tips of his toes to the ground and again marveled at how easy it was to send one’s self jetting off with the slightest push. Opening the round door, Harrison was met with the warmly glowing face of Xao-Xing Liu.

      “
Oh,” he said with some surprise. “It’s you.”

     
Looking quickly from side to side, Liu shrugged slightly.

      “
Can I come in for a minute?”

      “
Sure,” he replied dumbly.

     
From the first time he had met her, sitting alone in that conference room in Kennedy Space Center, Harrison had harbored a secret crush for Liu. With the help of Copernicus, he had gained access to her personnel file and been more than impressed with what he saw. A physics graduate of Fudan University in Shanghai, Liu spoke seven languages including German, French, English and Russian. After university, she went on to join the CNSA, the China National Space Administration, where she worked hard and was quickly accepted into their aeronautics program. From there, she spent four months as a representative from the CNSA during a global effort to build a self-sustained space station in high Earth orbit. The mission was eventually scrapped, and the project was moved to the Moon—where it manifested itself into the Bessel Base program—but, by then, Liu had returned to Earth. Harrison remembered feeling his heart drop when he had read that Liu was married to a powerful Beijing real estate mogul. As much as he liked her, he had no desire to become entangled in a sordid affair with a married woman.

     
In the weeks and months following their initial meeting, an easy friendship had blossomed between the two, but, try as he might, Harrison could not shake his true desires for her. Worse yet was the almost obvious fact that she felt the same way he did.

     
It was on their first day at Bessel base over two years ago that Harrison had noticed, much to his excited surprise, that Liu no longer wore her wedding ring. The environment at Bessel Base had not been without the opportunity for romance. Viviana and Elizabeth had eventually begun sharing a room, and there were even speculations that Captain Vodevski had an eye for the young pilot Joseph Aguilar. By happy accident, Harrison and Liu had been scheduled to spend a large amount of time together in training. Since Liu was the payload expert, and because Harrison knew next to nothing about the equipment he would be using during his mission, it became her responsibility to teach him how to safely work the automated excavating robots designed by the CNSA. Much of their training together had been done EVA: outside the dome of Bessel Base. There, on the vicious surface of the Moon, a special kind of trust had quickly formed between the two, something natural and unspoken. Space was a lethal environment, and even simple mistakes had dire consequences. Thus, a trustworthy partner meant the difference between a successful EVA and an instantaneous death.

     
On Harrison’s first ever Moonwalk, Liu had taken him for a hike in the Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity. An area of sloping basalt ridges covered with fine lunar dust, the Mare was a peaceful and hauntingly beautiful landscape of sterile gray rock. With silent grace, their footfalls had sent puffs of shimmering Moon dust floating upwards like flakes of snow or ash carried away by a tumbling wind. During the walk, the two had crested the high ridge of an impact crater and stood together—staring up at the Earth. In stark and stunning contrast to the gray, pockmarked lunar surface, the brilliant blue Earth had looked as fertile and welcoming as the Garden of Eden. As they peered at their home world, Harrison remembered how Liu had taken his gloved hand in hers, squeezing it tightly. For nearly half an hour they had stayed like that in silence, watching the Earth turn slowly in the blackness of infinity.

     
Moving past him in the narrow entryway, Liu squeezed into the small room, and Harrison picked up the faint scent of her hair. It reminded him of sweet wet flowers after a heavy rain.

      “
Oh, it’s so much warmer in here than in my room!” she exclaimed with strained lightness.

      “
You just have to ask Braun, and he’ll turn up the heat,” said Harrison, somewhat nervously.

     
What is she doing here? he asked himself, stabs of hope and desire growing in the pit of his stomach.

     
Looking about the cramped space, Liu’s large brown eyes lingered momentarily on Harrison, then shot down at the ground. Neither of them said anything for several moments as they stood an arm’s length apart.

      “
So,” began Harrison, forcing his voice to stay low and even. “Long day, huh?”

     
Liu brought her gaze up from her feet and met Harrison’s, then flicked it away to the corner of the room.

      “
Yes, I liked vid chatting with your parents. They seem nice.”

     
Holding the ceiling rail to keep himself from drifting, Harrison nodded.

      “
Yeah, they’re pretty excited for me. Your parents are dead, right?”

     
Liu looked quickly at him, then down at her feet again.

     
Smooth, man. Really smooth, he screamed silently.

      “
They died when I was at university,” she spoke softly. “My, um, husband couldn’t make the vid chat session because he was in a meeting I think.”

      “
Oh,” said Harrison lamely.

     
Again, Liu raised her eyes to meet his, and again they stood in tense silence.

     
Feeling his cheeks begin to burn, Harrison decided to take the plunge.

      “
Did you need something from me, Liu?”

     
Eyes widening, Liu touched her lips absently, as she often did when thinking.

      “
I don’t know.”

     
Cocking an eyebrow, Harrison nodded slowly.

      “
I think I know how you feel.”

     
Searching her face, he saw that she was nervous—almost shaking. Putting a hand out, he touched her cheek. She quickly took his hand in hers and pressed it against her lips, kissing the backs of his fingers. A tear broke the corner of her eye, and she blinked. The little droplet of water turned into a perfect sphere of translucent light and drifted away from her face.